Right Side Spirituality

The gospel for this Sunday is John 4: 5-42, the story of the woman at the well.

Most people are familiar with the fact that our brains have two sides of operation, the left side and the right side with the right side of the brain being used for creativity and the left side for analytical, logical thinking. Often it ends up that our creative side is stifled because the left side of the brain has a tendency to over-analyze everything. It assumes it knows what things should look like, what is reasonable, what is allowed and what is acceptable. The left side of the brain can be quite the critic.

God created the functions of both sides of the brain and both are essential for balanced living. The problems arise when one side is developed more than the other side and, it has to be said, we live in a world that tends to value left brain functions over right brain functions.

Jesus knew this. Jesus himself was completely balanced in how his brain operated but he came to a world and to a religion that valued and trusted left brain perspectives. So, what did he do? Mainly he shocked and confused people because he taught "outside the box” and challenged people to see beyond what they were used to seeing. He used story, analogy, metaphor, miracles – and love.

Take the woman at the well for instance. The whole dialog between Jesus and the woman was a dialog between left and right brain points of view with the woman representing the left-brain and Jesus representing the right. The conversation began with Jesus making a request that was completely outside the acceptable code of behavior. He not only spoke to a Samaritan woman who was a social outcast but he asked her to get him a drink of water. We think this simply shows how Jesus loved and accepted everyone no matter who they were, which is true, but it also shows that Jesus valued this woman so much that he desired to communicate something of immense importance to her to let her know how loved she was and he knew the only way to get to that point of true communication was to jar her out of her preconceptions immediately and keep her from dragging the conversation into the realms of ‘the way it’s always been’ and ‘what I know in my head.’

Listen to this first part of the dialog between Jesus (right brain) and the woman (left brain) and see how Jesus refused to allow the analytic and the critic to dominate the conversation.

Jesus said to her, ‘Give me a drink’. Jesus knew that this would shock the woman. He immediately started speaking and acting outside the parameters of acceptable behavior.

The Samaritan woman said to him, ‘How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?’ (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) She immediately countered with logical analysis of the situation based on common assumptions or traditions and she was a bit critical because she didn’t know how to deal with his words and actions.

Jesus answered her, ‘If you knew the gift of God and who it is that is saying to you, “Give me a drink”, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.’ This was a totally unexpected response. He did not enter into a debate with her about the rightness or wrongness of his request or of the law; he simply jarred her a little more and shifted the whole meaning of ‘water’ from the material plane to the spiritual plane by using imagery that was designed to awaken desire in her.

The woman said to him, ‘Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?’  The woman didn’t ‘get it’ and came back with more logic and more criticism; she wanted to debate the issue. She was also slightly defensive in case he was denigrating the Well of Jacob, which held great significance for the Samaritans.

Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ Again, Jesus refused to enter into a discussion based on the prevalent accepted logic. He creatively opened her to the idea of a full life in God and again used the image of water, something essential to life, to open her ears, eyes and heart.

I’m not going to write a commentary about the whole Gospel passage of this week’s reading but I encourage you to go and read it and see for yourself how Jesus kept refusing to fit into the woman’s ideas of law and logic, and kept creatively drawing her further and further out of her preconceived ideas until finally she broke through to joyful epiphany and entered into the kind of realization that doesn’t come from the intellect but from the heart. She most likely wasn’t an educated woman but this didn’t matter. Whether one is intellectually brilliant and knows everything there is to know about one’s religion or whether one has little formal education and only knows a smattering of religious law from hearing others talk about it, God is constantly trying to shift us beyond what we think we know. He wants us to dive into the well of his heart to find Living Water and that experience may not always come to us the way we think it will…or the way we think it should.

In a book titled, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” (Betty Edwards), the author suggests a simple exercise: take a photo of something you want to draw, turn it upside down and then sketch it. Why upside down? Because when it’s right side up, the brain thinks it knows what should be drawn and unless one is very gifted artist with exceptionally keen observational skills, what the brain thinks should be there is rarely exactly what is really there.

When Jesus spoke to the people he encountered, how often did he turn their ideas of God and spirituality completely upside down, pairing images and perspectives in a way that was completely foreign to them? He knew that the only way they could see things from a fresh and living perspective was to have their whole image of God turned upside down. How often do we need to have our images and expectations totally shifted and upended in order for God to open us up to the full reality of his love? How open to this are we? How much do we cling to what we think should be there?

We feel comfortable when we know the rules and have all the right information. We like to know there is a logical progression that can be followed and we feel secure when there’s a definite conclusion that can be reached. We feel more in control when we think that A+B will always = C. But what happens when the Lord meets us at the well and tells us that L+W=J (squared)?

Can we handle a creative God?